Friday, July 15, 2016

On Terrorism and Immigration, America Is Not a Serious Nation

When the avowedly socialist president of France, recently pilloried in the media for spending $11,000 a month on his haircuts, can immediately say after the horror in Nice that his nation is under attack from Islamic terrorism, but the U.S. president cannot blame anything other than “violent extremism” for the brutal terrorist attacks on our own soil, one sees how deeply unserious a country America has become. And this is true not just among politicians, but in our entire public culture, which has ultimately permitted as dangerous, divisive, and shallow a man as President Obama to occupy the highest office in the land. “All of France is under the threat of Islamic terrorism,” said French president Francois Hollande in the immediate aftermath of the attack, showing more directness and forthrightness not only than the entire Obama administration, but even at many times, the Bush administration, which often preferred to talk about a “war on terror” without mentioning the source of the overwhelming majority of that terror. We’ve fallen so far that a French socialist dandy is teaching us about resolve in the face of terror, just as previously a bunch of French leftist cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo taught the simpering cowards in our mainstream media a lesson about the true purpose of and, sadly, the ultimate price that must sometimes be paid for, defending free speech and expression. Meanwhile in the U.S., how did we respond to 9/11? We dramatically increased Muslim immigration (by somewhere between 50 percent and 200 percent depending on what source one consults). Approximately 2 million Muslims have legally settled here since we were attacked by Muslim terrorists waging jihad against the U.S., to mention nothing of the huge number of illegal Muslim immigrants crossing the border. In 2014, we added an order of magnitude more immigrants from countries such as Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Somalia than we did from France. And the current strategy from our president is to bring in tens of thousands more Syrians and to attack the character and integrity of anyone who opposes his suicidal immigration policies. As a resident of Silicon Valley, I understand the importance of attracting highly skilled immigrants in creating jobs and prosperity in the American economy. If some of those highly skilled immigrants happen to be Muslim and they want to embrace not just our economic benefits, but our way of life that generates them, then they are welcome here. But is that really primarily what is largely being represented by these groups of immigrants? On the whole, is their immigration to America at anywhere near these levels in the national interest? Does our allegedly elevated and “sophisticated” public discourse even permit us to ask such questions? Does America exist for the benefit of American citizens, or does it exist to benefit whomever Obama and the Democrats feel like favoring that day? Is America a great nation or an open-borders charity ward that does a growing side business in breeding jihadis? Any nation that has reacted as we have after being attacked by Muslim jihadis almost 15 year ago is not a serious nation. It is not a nation with a grand strategy for remaining the world’s pre-eminent power while ensuring the life, health, and prosperity of its citizens. It is not a nation that is serious about preserving its distinctive culture, habits, and institutions. Our leadership has devolved into a pusillanimous group of virtue-signalers for whom cowardice and cant masks itself as compassion. The Democrats, of course, have been almost universally awful, if not, at times nearly treasonous, on immigration and terrorism, but sadly many leading Republicans, particularly on immigration, are hardly any better. If you want to know why Donald Trump, for all of his boorishness, superficiality, and lack of conservatism will be accepting the nomination of America’s conservative party next week in Cleveland, you need look no further than the martyred dead of Nice. If we can’t bear to say for what they died, and to forthrightly name and defeat the forces that attacked them, then too many of us will ultimately suffer their fate. Our cowardice will be the wellspring of our own destruction. In Nice, the voice of our brothers’ blood is crying out to us from the ground. Is America willing, at long last, to hear it? Jeremy Carl is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University